It’s derivative because most of it is copied.
But looking through his depressingly large and unvaried output, I couldn’t exactly understand what he was getting at. What’s with the “obey” theme? It seems to be negative when connected with US-related images, but then it also appears on the portraits of people who are his heroes or things related to the “people.”
He clearly likes thugs like Mao and Che, and depicts them in a heroic light, which I suppose is what his “giant” theme is all about.
Maybe he’s like one of the gays who goes down to the South of Market bar dressed in leather and wearing an SS cap. They’re kind of wimpy people themselves, but they love the fantasy of power and brutality.
In any case, I find his work downright creepy. I’ve seen some of the posters (such as the ones with various heroic-looking armed militants) stuck on the sides of buildings in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a squalid area that is also a hotbed of “community organizing” groups.
What I meant was that his whole aesthetic is derivative, from soup to nuts. He brings nothing new to the table--this quasi-corporate logo stuff is so old it creaks, yet he is praised not because of any inherent quality in the work, but only because he's pushing a certain political perspective. If he were doing something NEW while pushing it, I'd have to admire the originality. But this cut-and-paste-to-distort-original-meaning stuff is really creaky Greenwich Village handbill stuff.